By Nancy Reddy
Neither my husband nor I knew anything about babies before ours was born. But I was the one who carried the baby; I was his mother. I’d expected to be transformed. I’d absorbed such deep messages about the magic of motherhood, how once the baby was born, my deep love for him would make all the sleepless nights worth it, how my maternal instincts would teach me how to care for him. That was what I understood a good mother to be: someone who’s capable, because of biology and love, of caring for the baby totally on her own. And that was what I saw all around me, in those early years, all those good mothers, who certainly would have identified as feminists, and yet, as soon as they had babies, they were in a world of women. I watched them, walking in the farmers market, sitting at the café with their tea and their babies sleeping in slings. Where were their husbands? I didn’t once wonder. The mother and her baby made a complete world all their own.
This is the way attachment theory is still with us. Though I didn’t know the name John Bowlby when I first became a mother, his ideas were in the air all around me: the smart, ambitious women I’d worked with in my twenties, who’d left their careers when they had children because they wanted to be really present for all those early moments; the focus on bonding in the earliest weeks of a child’s life as a time to forge a connection that would last a lifetime; the belief that mothers had special, innate knowledge of their children’s moods and needs. Attachment theory has had a powerful influence on what we think makes a good mother, and because it’s so pervasive, that influence has been nearly subterranean. Of course a child does best with the devoted care of his mother, of course the first years set a child on a trajectory that will be all but impossible to alter later. Once those ideas have taken root, they’re hard to even name, much less resist.
Bowlby certainly didn’t invent unrealistic expectations for mothers. Each era has had its own impossible ideal. You could think of the Victorian-era image of the Angel in the House, or the Revolutionary War-era Republican Mother, whose education and intellect were valued only because they allowed her to shape the character of the next generation of citizens. Those ideals, of course, only held for white women; in the same era, Black and Brown women were subject to forced sterilization, and enslaved women had long had their children stolen from them. For Bowlby and others, it was really only white middle-class mothers who were worth researching and improving.
Bowlby’s particular genius was to draw together research from multiple fields, including the natural sciences, which held a higher status than his home field of psychology, and hand pick the pieces that best supported his ideas. Bowlby and Harlow both excelled at using the popular press to circulate their ideas, and journalists were eager to promote the science that so nicely aligned with the cultural imperatives of the day. Together, Bowlby and Harlow took ideas about motherhood that had long been ambient in the culture and encased them in the durable shell of science.
And, of course, if it’s true that a child’s physical and psychological health, their present and future well-being, all depend on the mother’s total devotion, if it’s true that “the future of a child’s mind is determined by her mother’s heart,” as one scholar characterized Bowlby’s work, then it makes a certain sense to accept that becoming a mother means setting aside all your own interests and needs. With the approach of the Cold War, the private work of mothers took on public stakes: it wasn’t just about raising healthy individual children, but about ensuring a future generation that could fight Communism and win the space race. No sacrifice could be too small in safeguarding the future of your child and the nation.
Attachment theory made the consequences of mothers’ labor clear. Here, it seemed, was hard proof that a mother’s constant care for her child was her valuable contribution to her family and her country. Anything less than total devotion would have devastating repercussions. That harm would reverberate not only through that child’s life but would spiral outward to the entire community. But what if the line from an endlessly adoring mother to a healthy child isn’t so certain? What if all that science is, in fact, much shakier than we’ve been led to believe?
In the WHO report that would launch his career, Bowlby described not just the necessity of a mother’s care but the satisfaction a woman must take in providing that care. He wrote, “Just as the baby needs to feel that he belongs to his mother, the mother needs to feel that she belongs to her child, and it is only when she has the satisfaction of this feeling that it is easy to devote herself to him.” Once a mother has achieved this easy devotion, she’ll be able to care for her baby in the way Bowlby expects, which he describes in the following sentence: “the provision of constant attention day and night, seven days a week and 365 days a year.” Even as she sleeps, the mother is mostly a person for her baby. This is the kind of mothering Bowlby meant when he named the paperback edition of his report Child Care and the Growth of Love.
To develop his WHO report, Bowlby spent five months traveling across Europe to meet with experts and observe the care of children in four different countries, then spent an additional five weeks in the United States. His journals and letters from the time, though, show that Bowlby’s conclusions were largely predetermined before his journey began: whatever ills those children suffered, the mothers were almost certainly to blame. He’d been commissioned to carry out a research trip, but it was really more like a scavenger hunt, as he spent those months searching for findings that would prove what he already believed. Before his departure, he wrote that he worried about “the danger of racketing about seeing too many people—half of whom [would] be pretty stupid.” And as he traveled across France, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Sweden, he happily recorded the information in alignment with his ideas about mothers as the source of their children’s mental and physical health. When his findings ran counter to his theory, he seems to have essentially just put down his pen. One scholar characterized Bowlby’s trip as an opportunity for him to share his ideas internationally and an optimal chance “to gather evidence that confirmed this view.” For a scientist with rigorous training from his country’s elite institutions, Bowlby had a curious predilection for selecting only the evidence that best suited the argument he’d wanted to make anyway.
Bowlby believed that only the mother could properly care for her child. He even coined a term for the precise way a child depends on his mother: monotropy. Bowlby, whose father had been a surgeon to the royal household for King Edward VII and King George V, drew on the example of the monarchy to illustrate the principle: “much as each of the subjects of the realm come to direct his loyalty toward the queen,” so, too, the baby depends on his mother. Like heliotropy, the way a plant bends toward the sun as it grows, a child bends toward his mother. There can be no substitute.
It’s perhaps not surprising that someone who began his trip by writing that it was “very doubtful whether I shall pick up much of value which I do not know about already” reported findings that aligned to what he’d believed before he set out. Since the late 1930s, Bowlby had been arguing that maternal care or lack thereof was at the root of child delinquency. Charged with examining the mental health of homeless children, he once again blamed mothers.
Reading this research, I always wonder why the scientists of the day spent so much time and so many resources theorizing about those children’s inner lives and who could be to blame.
Couldn’t the problem of homelessness have been solved, in part, by giving families homes? It turned out the Swedes had taken this approach, and they paired psychiatric research with programs meant to address social factors like poor housing, unemployment, and parental addiction. The Swedish approach to supporting struggling children and families assumed the problem might be not in a mother’s heart but in an empty pantry. Bowlby, unsurprisingly, didn’t care for this approach. He mentioned it only briefly in his report.
Rereading Bowlby’s work now, his insistence that a good mother would not only devote herself entirely to her child, but feel totally fulfilled by that work—it seems an idea that could only have been invented by someone with very little practical experience of the day-to-day care of a baby. That work is beautiful, yes, and full of joy and wonder, but it’s also exhausting and sometimes lonely and often just boring. Bowlby, a man who spent his life in clinics and conferences, studying mothers and telling them what to do, seems to have almost no knowledge of the ongoing labor of mothering and what trying to do that work alone could do to a woman.
But: Bowlby did have someone in his life who was endeavoring to help him understand the realities of those early postpartum months. His wife, Ursula, recorded her own experience of early motherhood in wrenching detail in the letters she wrote him during the first year of their first child’s life. Bowlby had married Ursula in 1938, and their daughter Mary, the first of four children, was born in February 1939. Mary’s first year coincided with England’s entry into the war, and while Bowlby continued working in London, Ursula moved outside London to stay with her mother and brother. Though Bowlby intended to visit each weekend, he was often unable to travel to see his wife and infant daughter more than once every other week.
In this way, Bowlby repeated the parenting practices of his own father, who had often been away in his childhood, and who, even when home, typically spent only an hour or so on Sundays with his children. A few years after his beloved nanny Minnie left the family, Bowlby’s parents sent him and an older brother off to boarding school, an experience Bowlby found traumatic.
Into his seventies, he was still talking about the horrors of that early boarding school experience, and he was frequently quoted as saying he “wouldn’t send a dog away to boarding school at age seven.” For a man who didn’t like to talk about his childhood (Ursula wrote in her journals that she’d understood early in their relationship that talking about his family was “tabu”), he shared that story widely. It’s clear Bowlby believed the way he was raised, the way many children of his class and time were raised, was harmful. But instead of being a different kind of parent himself, he devoted his career to telling women how they might mother better.
From The Good Mother Myth: Unlearning Our Bad Ideas About How to Be a Good Mom by Nancy Reddy. Copyright © 2025 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Publishing Group.